How babysitting a mountain lion helped me make $100,000 in self-publishing
Before my first book was sold on store shelves, before my video projects aired on television, way before I created a brand around my name, I was a magician who made a living performing on stage. I got off to a great start and had my first world tour when I was 19 headlining on a cruise ship. Soon after I was performing in resorts and casinos all around the world. I traveled. I made money. I met interesting people. I hated it.
What seemed like a great lifestyle at 17 turned out to be less than I thought at 20. Part of it was my attitude. Another part of it was the fact that working on ships and resorts meant working in smoke-filled bars and living out of a suitcase for long periods of time. The glamour fades when you realize that the same guy that books you into a gig also books that chimpanzee that rides a tricycle and plays the kazoo.
In one six-month period I performed 500 shows without a day off. It wasn’t a strenuous job. All I really did was point at boxes while my assistants jumped out and did all the work. However, it was monotonous and wasn’t very creative.
When I realized that I wanted to get away from performing for a while I took a look at my skills and considered my options. My options were based upon the things I knew and could do that had value to other people. My peers in magic recognized me as being very creative. I had several tricks published in other people’s books. Publishing my own book seemed like a logical choice. But how would I go about it?
Publishing is both expensive and risky. Self-publishing is even more so if you don’t know what you are doing. I knew several authors that had garages filled with books that just weren’t selling. By the time I’d decided to take a different career direction, I’d spent most of the money I had made from my last tour. If I was going to venture into publishing, it was going to be on a shoestring budget.
I planned careful and launched my first book for less than $100. To date, that book has made over $100,000. Not a bad return on my investment. More important than how much money I made off that book is what I learned from the experience. Those principles have helped form my approach to business in general from DVDs to iPhone apps.
When I wrote that book
I didn’t even have my own computer. I spent one weekend at my parent’s house using theirs. With some notes I’d made over the past couple months, I wrote a book for magicians on stage magic. It was a niche within a niche. I showed it to a couple friends who were also magicians. They thought it was pretty good. Now what? I didn’t have the money to spend on a press run. I didn’t even have the money to take out an ad for the book. I had enough money to live on for a couple more months, but little else.
Fortunately for me I had a friend who owed me a favor. Off and on, for several months I’d feed a cougar that belonged to my friend Rand Woodbury when he was out of town. Rand also happened to have published a book in the same niche as I was writing for. He’d taken out ads and put together a mailing list of people who bought his book. Out of gratitude, Rand let me use this list to launch my book.
Inevitably, someone will read this and complain that I got a lucky break. If you think feeding a 200-pound wild animal that would like to snap into your neck like a Slim Jim a lucky break, I got a job for you riding a tricycle playing a kazoo. I could have created my own list with a few hundred dollars. Instead, I babysat a cougar and got it. Lucky me.
Mailing list in hand; on my parent’s computer, I designed a flyer and made 250 copies at Office Depot for $10. I bought $80 worth of postage, spent another $9 on labels and sent out 250 flyers to that mailing list. At that point only one copy of the book existed in the world. I was hoping that I would get enough orders to pay for a print run so I could fill the orders and offer the book to magic distributors and fill their orders without having to borrow any money. I also was hoping to make enough money to pay for a full-page ad in the leading magic magazine.
I took all those flyers down to the post office and mailed them. I then waited.
One week later the orders started to come in - about 50 in all that week. Was that a success? It’s all relative. The retail price of the book was pretty steep at $40, but well within the standard price for something in that niche. That $99 spent on printing and postage had turned into $2,000 in orders in just 14 days.
I used this money to pay for the first run of books at Office Depot (100) and sent copies to distributors along with a copy of the ad I was going to run in Magic Magazine. The distributors ordered 400 copies at jobber rate (60% off retail). That was $6,400 in orders.
I used part of the profits from my first sale to pay for that print run. When my ad ran two months later, even more orders came in. Within the first 60 days I’d made $10,000 from a book I wrote in one weekend on a $99 dollar budget and still had all my fingers.
On the success of my first book, I wrote more books and created a publishing company. Today, I have over 40 titles in print and still make money from the very first book I ever wrote.
For many of us, the first dollar we ever made was a moment to remember. After I started receiving checks for my first book I had a realization that stayed with me ever since; I was making money while I was doing nothing. Sure, I’d been paid to stand around and do nothing before then. On the average cruise ship gig I’d work only two nights and week and then only for two hours that night. But after that week, I didn’t make any more money for the work I put into that show. No matter how hard I worked, I only got paid once. Writing is different. If you work really hard, and write something really useful, it has lasting value.
That experience taught me the value of intellectual property. If you’re smart, you work and you invest a portion of your money so it can earn more money for you. That’s the most common way to invest in yourself. You can do that and create a way for your past work to still bring in money. That can be something as simple as growing a business you own that has real value, or you can take it a step further and work towards creating your own intellectual property.
People make money from content all around you. The magazines you read, the music you listen to, the movies you watch and the books on your shelf all contain information that belongs to someone. That information can be words, images or sound. What makes it valuable is the fact that you want it. To get access to it, you’re willing to pay for it or tolerate somebody trying to sell you something.
Increasingly, companies are beginning to realize that they’re in the intellectual property business and not the manufacturing business. Microsoft sells software and not DVDs. Even their X-Box is made in another company’s factory. It goes straight from there to your home. It never stops in a Microsoft warehouse. They sell X-Boxes at a loss because they make their money selling content. The game Halo 2 made $100 million it’s first day of release. There’s lots of money in content.
As the price of manufactured goods goes down, we spend more money on content like video games, books and DVDs. This is great news for you. This means the demand for the content you have the potential to create is only going to increase.
I discovered through dumb luck that you could create content and make money at it without a whole lot of cash. My company, Maynestream Productions, which now produces books, videos and television content was started with a $99 investment. If you’ve got creativity and ambition, that’s enough. You don’t even need a cougar.
Broken down into steps, here’s how I turned $99 into a publishing company:
1. I found a niche that was suited for my skills
2. I identified an audience within that niche
3. I created a product that would be in demand
4. I found an inexpensive way to market to that niche
5. I found a way to grow
Have any questions or comments? Email me at andrew@andrewmayne.com
